Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

By : Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli
5 (1)
Book Image

PostgreSQL 14 Administration Cookbook

5 (1)
By: Simon Riggs, Gianni Ciolli

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source database management system with an enviable reputation for high performance and stability. With many new features in its arsenal, PostgreSQL 14 allows you to scale up your PostgreSQL infrastructure. With this book, you'll take a step-by-step, recipe-based approach to effective PostgreSQL administration. This book will get you up and running with all the latest features of PostgreSQL 14 while helping you explore the entire database ecosystem. You’ll learn how to tackle a variety of problems and pain points you may face as a database administrator such as creating tables, managing views, improving performance, and securing your database. As you make progress, the book will draw attention to important topics such as monitoring roles, validating backups, regular maintenance, and recovery of your PostgreSQL 14 database. This will help you understand roles, ensuring high availability, concurrency, and replication. Along with updated recipes, this book touches upon important areas like using generated columns, TOAST compression, PostgreSQL on the cloud, and much more. By the end of this PostgreSQL book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to manage your PostgreSQL 14 database efficiently, both in the cloud and on-premise.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Maintaining indexes

Just as tables can become bloated, so can indexes. However, reusing space in indexes is much less effective. In the Identifying and fixing bloated tables and indexes recipe, you saw that non-HOT updates can cause bloated indexes. Non-primary key indexes are also prone to some bloat from normal INSERT commands, as is common in most relational databases. Indexes can become a problem in many database applications that involve a high proportion of INSERT and DELETE commands.

autovacuum does not detect bloated indexes, nor does it do anything to rebuild indexes. Therefore, we need to look at other ways to maintain indexes.

Getting ready

PostgreSQL supports commands that will rebuild indexes for you. The client utility, reindexdb, allows you to execute the REINDEX command conveniently from the operating system:

$ reindexdb

This executes the SQL REINDEX command on every table in the default...